Nothing here is adopted. The design rule says one root, one job. Two roots break it, both inherited from before the rule was written down, and verb-chains.md records them as one open question. This page separates them, because they are not the same decision — one is free and one is expensive.
madad — the decision costs nothing
madad is glossed “help; to help”. It has never been used in a sentence:
not in a lesson, not in a text, not in the phrasebook. Counted across the whole
material on September 4, 2026, the only line a scanner finds is the
phrasebook’s list of bare words separated by dots, which is not an utterance.
check.py recounts that, so the claim cannot go stale.
That is unusual and it matters. Every other open question has sentences at stake. This one has none: whichever way it goes, nothing has to be rewritten. Lesson 08 teaches the word and then deliberately shows no sentence containing it, which is why.
The imperative rule, settled after this question was opened, tips it
The cry Madad! is the word’s commonest use in every source language. Since September 3, 2026, a verb with no subject is a command — so if madad is a verb, Madad! is already a grammatical sentence and needs no rule at all. As a noun it is a one-word fragment, which the same page also grants, so both readings survive the cry.
What separates them is the other sentence. Text 18 is a scene about a police officer helping a driver and cannot say so: Polisi madad sofer is the sentence the story is about. As a verb that line becomes writable. As a noun, “to help” needs a new root and the language has none.
| If madad is | Madad! | Polisi madad sofer | What A2 must add |
|---|---|---|---|
| a verb | a command | writable | a noun for “help”, if one is ever wanted |
| a noun | a fragment | impossible | a verb for “to help” |
Two is now a measured figure and not an assumption. Swept September 6,
2026: every root standing straight after a pronoun subject, which is the verb
slot and nothing else — a noun beside a noun would be ambiguous with
possession, and after a pronoun it cannot be. Only rabota comes back. The
count had never been checked, and it was wrong three days earlier: kanta was
doing both jobs in text 21, where a doubled
verb read as sing a song, and adjacency rather than the verb slot is what
found it. check.py now holds both shapes, so a third root
cannot join madad and rabota without saying so.
rabota — the decision costs twenty sentences
rabota is glossed “work”, one noun, and is used both ways. Recounted inside
the material — the lessons, the texts and the phrasebook — eleven places put
it straight after a subject (Mi rabota sini, Ta-ta rabota, Kita rabota
cok) and nine put a verb or a quantity in front of it (Mi suru rabota,
Kita finis rabota, Mi suda naiti rabota baru). Twenty in all, and the
convention is places rather than sentences, because a cost is what would have
to be rewritten and the same sentence printed twice is two rewrites. Counting
each distinct sentence once instead gives ten and seven, seventeen in all;
check.py holds both figures.
verb-chains.md reports thirteen and six over a wider scope that includes the grammar files; the figures differ by where the count is drawn, not by what the sentences say.
This heading said eighteen until September 5, 2026, and eighteen is not any reading of the material. Every occurrence gives 11 and 9; every distinct sentence gives 10 and 7. The page had taken its eleven from the first count and its seven from the second and added them — which is how a number no method produces gets written down, and why the two conventions are now named rather than assumed.
The nine are exactly the ambiguous ones. Ta suda lasim rabota is “she had to work” if rabota is a verb and “she had to have work” if it is a noun, and nothing on the page decides which.
The costs are already measured in verb-chains.md: read as a verb, one site breaks; read as the noun the dictionary calls it, ten do. That asymmetry is not an argument by itself — the cheaper repair is not the same as the right answer — but it is the number the decision has to face.
The policy behind both
Every root added since the rule was written has one job. These two are the inheritance, not the practice. Three ways out:
| What it means | |
|---|---|
| Split them | each root takes one job, and the other job waits for A2 or goes without |
| Allow two jobs where position disambiguates | Mi rabota is a verb because a subject precedes it; suru rabota is a noun because a verb does. This is what English does and it works — but it makes position carry meaning in a second, new way, and the language has spent 300 roots keeping one job per shape |
| Leave it open | the current state: the words are taught and the sentences avoided. It has cost one word its entire use |
What is measured and what is judgement
Measured: madad’s zero sentences, rabota’s split above, the one-site
against ten-site repair cost, and the fact that every root added since has one
job. check.py recounts the first two.
Judgement, and the founder’s: whether a root may ever hold two jobs, and if not, which job each of these two keeps.